Madbond

by Nancy Springer

  I could not get up at once—the breath was knocked out of me. Confound it, and someone had seen me. It was Korridun, coming up the headland with a large willow basket on his arm and, of all things, children, six or seven very small children swarming around his heels like so many weanling pups. Strings of limpet shell hung around their pudgy necks to ward off ill luck, the demons that take children in the night. Kor walked slowly for the sake of the children, and he looked as if he was going to ask me whether I had hurt myself. I hated him. Forgetting the pain in my nates, I jumped up and strode to confront him.

  “Kor!” I shouted at him. “Why is that horse in that miserable pen?”

  “Lower your voice,” he told me without raising his own. “You’ll frighten the little ones.”

  They did look frightened of me, somewhat, but deemed that Korridun provided sufficient protection and clustered behind him, clinging to his legs, looking up with large eyes of dark brown. I lowered my voice.

  “She has worn herself to the bone with her frenzy in there. It is too small. She was born to have the breadth of the steppes for running on.”

  “I know it,” Kor said with a faint note of sorrow in his voice but no shame. “We built the enclosure as ample as we could. We had to go far inland for the logs.”

  It was true, all the trees on coast and headland were blown into shapes as of tattered cloaks by the constant sea wind. Some crouched and crept along the very rock, like the spruces at the tree line up on the highmountain passes. Rampicks, we of the uplands called those half-dead trees broken off by wind. There was another thing with a name. Unlike me.

  The fanged mare squealed out an angry challenge.

  “She is never let out of there, I suppose,” I said curtly.

  “Never. No one can go near her without being attacked.”

  “But of what use is the steed to you, so wild?”

  “None whatsoever.”

  “Then why not make shift to set her free? Failing that, even killing her would be kinder.” My voice was rising again. Kor’s quietness maddened me.

  “Pajlat would take offense,” he said.

  I stood and stared at him. Pajlat was the fierce king of the Fanged Horse Folk.

  “Pajlat thinks more of his own scheming than of the creatures of Sakeema,” Korridun added. “The poor beast is his gift to me.”

  “Why would Pajlat give you such a gift?” I burst out.

  “To humiliate me,” said Kor. “He knows I cannot ride it.”

  He spoke quite levelly, and he was right, of course. There seemed to be something in him that spoke truth always, that did not sway to winds of pride or anger, a sureness that stunned me.

  Seeing that I was done with him for the time, he loosened the children from around his legs and sent them back down the headland toward the lodges. The little ones rolled about like ducks as they walked, their legs were so short. A thought came to me, why the children might be with him. Kings were expected to augment the numbers of their people.

  “Yours?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “I am not yet pledged.”

  No more was I, but I suspected I had fathered a few such scantlings.… Great Sakeema, what sort of a king was this one? I watched silently as he walked the rest of the way to the fanged mare’s pen. The horse shrilled and kicked the logs as he approached. Paying her no heed, Korridun climbed up the corner as I had done and emptied his basket of fish into the feeding trough ten feet below.

  “On the high plain, I know, they eat snakes,” he remarked to me. “But she has taken to the fish well enough. She would be fat if she did not wear it all off with her fretting.”

  The horse’s charge set the barrier to shuddering, and Kor climbed down, unhurried. I watched him in a sort of despair.

  “Are there no servingfolk to feed the horse?” I asked, nearly imploring. My tone made him grin. If I had known how rare such smiles were from him, I would have felt the gift of it.

  “No more than there are for you.”

  Well hit. It was true, I felt a sympathy with the maddened mare. I turned away from Korridun and watched her whirling around her prison while her food lay untouched. No, more than sympathy. A hidden kinship, a stirring of some dark understanding.

  “I will—” I stopped, swallowed, and started over again. Though I did not call Korridun “king,” I would remember that I was a guest in his household and owed him courtesy. “I would like to have the tending of her.”

  “To feed her?”

  “To take a long, strong rope and drop a loop of it over her head and give her freedom if only to the rope’s extent. I will need a stick also, to fend her off. But I think she will want mainly to run.”

  Korridun gave me a startled look. “You are so willing to risk your life?”

  “Yes!” Though I could not say why, I who did not know what had happened to send me to his side, I who did not know my own name. I felt the jolt of something shadowed, some feeling almost as nameless as I, and I quickly quelled it. Korridun was staring at me. I stared back.

  “Once you have regained your full strength,” he said at last.

  “I am strong enough!” I protested.

  “By Sedna’s bones, I believe you are nearly strong enough to wrestle the blue bear of Sakeema.” He did not smile, and I thought I heard something taut in his voice. “But I have my people’s well-being to think of, you know, should the mad thing escape you. Ask me again in three days.”

  He picked up his wicker basket and turned away. I found myself staring at his back, at the brown wool of his tunic. Very well, three days did not make so long a time.… “Does the horse have a name?” I called after him. He glanced back at me, a curious look taking hold of him.

  “No. It is as nameless as you.”

  I turned back to the mare, looking at her through the bars of the pen but keeping well back from hooves and tearing teeth. Her angry eyes met mine. Large, the largest eye I had ever seen in any beast, white-rimmed, with a dark center the color of cloudy water, brown with a bluish tinge. Sorrows of ages seemed to be hidden in that murky eye. I felt a sudden surge of compassion for her, the wild creature in her confinement.

  “I will undertake vigil for a name for you, daughter of the hot winds,” I promised her.

  As I had once done vigil for a name for myself.

  Chapter Three

  “Archer,” Kor protested, “you have not yet eaten even three full meals!”

  “So much the better. The trance will all the sooner come to me.”

  He puffed his cheeks at me in exasperation and urged me toward a seat by the firepit, fed me chunks of fish and some bitter-tasting green stuff from the sea. I sat at trencher this time, but ate with wrinkled nose.

  “Do the Seal Kindred not know the worth of red meat?” I demanded. “Is there not enough game on the slopes?”

  “Red meat? We feed it to yon fanged mare.” Kor faced me soberly, and I could not tell whether he was jesting with me.

  After I had eaten I took my place by “yon fanged mare” and ate nothing more for the days of the vigil, waiting for a name to come from Sakeema.

  He is legend, Sakeema, he-whom-all-we-seek. Yet more than legend, for he is god. Yet less than legend, for he is living man, and my grandfather’s grandfather once spoke to an old man who knew him as a friend.

  Sakeema was born in a cold cave far up on the snowpeaks, my folk say, and all the creatures came to look at the naked babe. The little shivering pika came and the mighty catamount, the otter, the white fox, the tall antelope of the crags, the badger, and the wolf standing next to the shy hare, and the peregrine perched in the blue pines alongside the wren. They all kept silent vigil. And when his human mother left him he was suckled by a deer. Or so the Red Hart people say—the Seal Kindred say he was born in a seaside cave and suckled by a cow seal, held to her breasts with her flippers and taken to swim in the sea. No one knows surely whence he came.

  Sakeema, the king who will come again. He did not quickly come t
o me, and I shivered through that first day in the smurr.

  Kor brought me a deerskin to sit on, and a woolen cloak to ward off the chill, and a sort of cape woven out of the inner bark of cedar to fend off the damp and the rain. I put the things on, for day was darkening into dusk and I was miserable with the weakness of the vigil starting already to come on me. He looked at me a moment, then nodded and left me.

  Sometime during the first night the mare grew weary of screeching and striking at me. She went to stand against the farther wall, and after that all was silence and blackness until dawn. There was something cruel and nameless gnawing at my heart, and it was hard to empty my mind for the sake of Sakeema when the silence oppressed me, making me feel crushed by blackness, as if I would drown. Nor could I run away. So I sang. Years later Seal folk told me how they lay awake and cursed me through the night of that singing.

  Nonsense, mostly, I sang, my voice no more melodious than that of the craking rail. “Mare, dare, what about this mare.… What a shame, the lady has no name.… Name, shame, where is her name.… I give it up, Sakeema, send a name.… King, sing, what sort of creature is a king, Sakeema, I beg of you. I give it up, what king, what a thing …” On and on. And sometimes snatches of the old songs with words no one understood:

  “The hart wears a crown but Sakeema wore none.

  Sakeema the king, where have you gone?

  Badgers have setts and the bears have their dens.

  Sakeema the king, where is your throne?

  What wantwits we are, what wanhopes all …”

  Wantwit and wanhope, indeed. I did not know what were a crown, a throne, nor had I ever seen a bear.

  I felt bereft.

  With dawn I saw barnacle geese feeding along the shoreline, and teetertails running, and seals swimming in the waves beyond the surf. The fanged mare snorted and struck at me, whirling about her pen, but mostly for show, I think—the blow lacked zest. I watched her and blinked with pity. Whirling …

  Even before the men had come out to launch the coracles, the day had blurred into dreaming for me.

  I was a warrior in the midst of battle, disgraced because I had let my horse be killed under me, but I fought on, afoot. Myself in an earlier body, perhaps, in the time when my grandfather’s grandfather was a lad. Though I was a yellow-braided Red Hart, much as ever. Who we fought, I cannot remember. It seemed as if we fought the whole world. There was a heavy-bearded Fanged Horse raider trying to run me down, and also I recall those bellowing giants of Cragsmen, and the narrow-eyed Otter with their female leader were in it somehow. But none of that seemed important, afterward: for he came.

  Riding on a massive stag he came, the antlers shielding him to either side, and he bore no weapon, but let his leaping mount take him into the thick of the combat. Great wolves ran snarling all about him, a black wolf by his left side and a white wolf by his right, and gray wolves and wolves of all colors, two tens of wolves, surging at his fore or crowding after him. And spotted wild dogs ran with him as well. Tall on his stag in the midst of the battle he raised his hands, and those who fought were flung into confusion by his coming, for their bolts and spears stalled in their flight and fell to earth as softly as feathers. And in every warrior’s hand the stone knives sagged to earth as if they were heavy as mountains. Even the Cragsmen could not lift their cudgels any longer. And Sakeema spoke, and there was a splendor about him so that even the striving kings fell to silence and listened.

  “This land, this vast dryland demesne, is rich in food and wandering room for all,” Sakeema averred. “Kings of the peoples, why do you battle with each other?”

  No one answered him, for no one seemed able to remember.

  “Go hence,” Sakeema told us all. “Roam in families and clans as the wolves do, find your food. Strive no longer after mastery.”

  And we common warriors felt bemused and glad enough to go. Most of us left at once, taking pause only to tend our dead or wounded. The kings withdrew to a distance and muttered with their counselors as the wolves watched them warily. But I strode up to speak with the one who sat on the great maned stag.

  “Give me a name,” I begged him.

  Sunset light banded his head in fire. I could not see his face as he looked down on me, only that skybright glory.

  “But has not your mother named you?” he asked me.

  “I have no mother.”

  “Your father?”

  “I have no father.”

  He slipped down from his mount, the stag lowering its head in a sort of bow as he did so, swinging its antlers out of his way. He crouched by the stag’s shoulder, sank his fingers into the earth, stood and offered me cupped hands full of loam.

  “Father and mother of us all,” he said.

  Seeing him wholly, I gazed at him, full of wonder and love, forgetting the matter of the name. “I will follow you forever,” I told him.

  “But, son of earth, I can lead you only into sorrow.”

  “No matter.”

  “You do not know. What if I ride away from you? What if I leave you here?”

  “I will search for you until the world’s end.”

  The gaze of his eyes never left mine, but his fingers worked the loam in his hands, stroking it, fondling it as if it were a living thing—it was. A tiny bird as blue as any mountain harebell fluttered up, warbled like a bubbling stream and flew, gone in sky. Sakeema’s gaze left mine at last to follow it.

  “Blue wren,” I whispered.

  “You have named it, son of earth.”

  It was a dream. I knew even as it happened that it was all a dream, too sweet to be real. Yet it was all true, as things dreamed are sometimes more true than things real, very truth, a truth I would have put my hand in fire for, and taken oath.

  Indeed I did travel with him. He sent his stag away, and we walked. Creatures came to him wherever we walked, and people, for there was healing in his touch. Battle’s wounded, made well. A woman dying of childbed fever, standing up to tend her baby. A small girl’s twisted leg made straight. Scrofula in a young man, gone as if it had never been.

  And there was that marvelous power in his hands, which I first had seen. If he took a bit of earth in his hands, or even a brown pine flower or a twig, and if he dreamed … The wonders that came of Sakeema’s hands and Sakeema’s dreams. Great-eared foxes called fennecs. Small burrowing bears. The crested jay, each of its feathers a different color from the others, and each brighter than the last. The tiny blue deer of Sakeema with antlers the clear color of ice. All these things I saw.

  That was the time of wonders, Sakeema’s time. There were a twelve of sorts of deer in those days, as many sorts as there are bodyguards in a king’s retinue, and I saw them all. Great maned elk, and the swimming deer with tines, small spotted deer, musk deer, the yellow deer with flattened antlers, black-tailed deer, many others—all gone, afterward, except the red. And the wolves, the foxes, their pelages—not gray only, as in the later time, but spice colored, like the trunk of a great upland pine, and black, blue, dun, yellow, brown, fawn, white, all beautiful. The foxes sat in the night and looked at Sakeema with shining eyes, and the wolves and the spotted wild dogs brought him meat, and the deer lay down by his side.

  I was not the only one who followed him, though I was the first. There came to be many others, and whatever questions they asked him, he would try to answer. And tales were told throughout the demesne of the marvels he did and of his wisdom, until at last, warily, the very kings came to him for counsel, and he spoke long with them.

  So another marvel came to be, that all six tribes learned to speak a common language: the Herders with their six-horned brown sheep, the salmon-eating Otter River Clan, the Red Hart, the Seal Kindred, the solitary Cragsmen, and the Fanged Horse Folk, fiercest warriors of us all. Even they followed peaceful ways during that time when folk called Sakeema “High King,” though he claimed no such title.

  One day in springtime—though in my vision it seemed always to be springtime�
��one day when the spotted lilies bloomed, a woman came and stood before Sakeema where he sat in a hemlock grove.

  “Honor me,” she told him with a smile. “I am your mother.”

  “I have no mother,” Sakeema said.

  The woman said, “I am your mother. Provide a home for me.”

  He got up slowly to stand and stare at her. “The All-Mother is my mother,” he said in a roughened voice, and only in that way did he ever call himself a god. And only I stood by to hear.

  “I am your mother,” the woman said. “I gave you life.” And he went to her and embraced her.

  “Turn your back!” I reproached him. “If she speaks truth, she abandoned you, left you in a cave to chance’s care!”

  “She speaks truth,” he said. “How can I turn my back? Life itself is the greatest gift.”

  In my vision it seemed as if he had built her a home at once, with the embrace, a great lodge of stone and timber standing in the midst of the demesne. The kings of the six tribes came there to hold council. Sakeema did not dwell within. He roamed under sky as always, and I with him.

  The woman who called herself his mother—perhaps she was his mother, for she possessed something of power: For evil. Her hand could never clearly be seen, but always after the kings met in her house there were spiteful faces, skirmishes in distant places, a feeling as of thunder forming in the reaches of sky, and Sakeema walked long and far to quell it.

  It was the female king of the Otter who made the accusation: that the mother of Sakeema was guilty of abomination, of loosely consorting with men pledged to others, and with boys so young they were yet nearly children, and even with young girls. It was whispered that she lay also with her own son. But that charge was not made. So on a day in springtime, on a day when the asphodel nodded yellow, the council of kings met and brought the charge of abomination, and they called on Sakeema for justice.

  I knew whose blood they truly craved. His. For being what he was, far greater than they.

  In my vision I cried out in despair to Sakeema, “All falls to ruin!”

  “Say not so, son of earth.” He was sitting by me amidst grass greenwild with spring, in a meadow where many deer grazed. Purple spires of amaranth swayed, the healing flower born of his own hands, loveliest of flowers, which after his passing withered and died. Except for me and the deer, all his friends had forsaken him. The beauty of the place where we sat only deepened my despair.